Hence, The Adjective ‘Snot-Nosed’

I just realized something rather shocking. My wife and kids make me sick.

Well actually, I guess, it’s the kids who make us both sick.

I’ve come to this understanding only after spending the last few weeks away from home on business. Not coincidentally, these were also the only weeks in the last six months when I have felt even remotely like myself. By which I mean, I felt like a healthy human being as opposed to a pile o’ human sludge.

Once upon a time I was the very picture of health. I got a cold once a year, sniffled a little, then kicked it like a football. I had the resistance of steel. My antibodies were nuclear. Nothing could get to me.

And then came the kids.

Where I avoid germs like, well … germs, they collect them like comic books. And then bring them home.

The last time we passed a week without at least one of them being sick, Bush was in the White House.

As vice president.

Seems like every time I turn around, the 14-year-old is complaining of a headache, the 11-year-old coughing up his guts, the 6-year-old running a fever or the baby toddling around the house with a crusty nose. Some days my place looks like a MASH unit. It wouldn’t be so bad if the kids kept their germs to themselves. Maybe if we had a quarantine room built where the den is now. … Maybe if we fed and cared for them using those plastic space suits movie doctors use to treat Ebola sufferers. …

Maybe then we could protect our health. But we have none of those things, so the same pattern keeps playing itself out. We nurse the kids back to health. And in return, they make us sick. No, scratch that. Actually, they keep us sick.

You get used to it.

It has become normal to me to go around with my nose running like Carl Lewis, my sinuses stuffed like Thanksgiving turkey, my eyes watering like Niagara Falls. I no longer think twice when I answer the phone and people think they’ve dialed Barry White’s house by mistake.

I’ve even become blase about hacking up chunks of green gunk that look too nasty to have come from a self-respecting sewage plant, let alone from inside my own personal body.

It was a few days after I left home that I felt something I wasn’t used to. Something so strange it took me awhile to identify it.

It was health.

But I’m returning home soon, which means that in a few days I’ll once again be a shuffling, hacking shadow of myself. It’s like in the movie Charly where the mentally deficient guy gets to be a genius for awhile, only to have the high IQ snatched away again.

Me, I’ve had a taste of this health thing. I’ve experienced dry eyes and clear sinuses, coughless nights and acheless days. I have even breathed!

Now, as I prepare to give it all up, I realize anew why no one really tells you what parenting is about before you get into it, why they don’t share with you the nitty or the gritty of what you’re about to get into. If they did, the human race would grind to a sudden halt. Besides which, misery is still inordinately fond of company.

So because no one dissuades us - or because, blinded by love, we don’t listen when they do - we keep volunteering for the toughest job there is. Keep stepping forward into a world of karate lessons, science projects, skinned knees and … perpetual germs. In sickness and in health, we say, thinking the vow applies to the person standing with us in front of the parson. Not even.

And I realize that as I write these words, some young couple, some first-time parents, are gazing into the eyes of newborn innocence, losing their hearts to a little thing with tiny perfect hands, dreaming of blue skies and uncluttered horizons. New parents, I want you to know something as you stand on the precipice of this odyssey.

I want you to know that I am laughing at you.

But don’t worry. Pretty soon, you’ll be laughing, too. It’s the only defense.

In the meantime, I guess I’ll load up on vitamin C and catch a plane on home. My wife keeps saying she misses me, but I’m not fooled.

She just hates to sniffle alone.

xxxx